Making Your Business Plan Stand Out (by finding a niche)

When it comes to starting a new business, an
entrepreneur is probably most excited about
the idea or the new market potential of a
service/product — and less excited about
actually writing a great business plan. But if you’re able to translate that energy and excitement about your new venture onto the pages of your business plan, you’ll be off to a great start in the business planning process.

The first step of crafting an outstanding plan is identifying and defining the unique qualities about the venture and clearly define what sets it apart from the competition. Combining your enthusiasm for the product/service and recognizing a unique niche market are the first ingredients of writing a fantastic plan that will set you apart from others.

There are great resources offered by the experts from the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) when getting started with forming a new venture, and the following are some helpful hints to help your business plan stand out from others by identifying a target market and building a niche for your business.

Be clear about what you’re offering

What is it that you’re really selling? If you’re in an industry where there are many competitors or similar types of ventures, what makes yours unique? You should be able to identify and describe the unique experience that your customer would have. Be specific about the features that set your business apart from the rest.

Some things to help when thinking about this include:

– What need(s) your product/service fulfills

– Benefits differentiators that will help your business stand out from the competition

Learn to strategize

In the spirit of clearly defining what it is that you’re selling, it’s important to keep in mind that it is better to be strategic and excel in a few market segments rather than becoming a jack-of-all-trades. Being able to do certain key things really well is better than an entrepreneur who does a little bit of everything without having a strong handle on any one element—especially if you’re a small business.

If your business offers a select number of very specialized products/services, not only will it be easier to define a specific marketing strategy, your business will essentially attract a niche market because of that specialization. This will also give the business and its employees the ability to put all of their efforts into excelling at those specific elements. Being a subject matter expert in your businesses’ market will help not only in the business planning process, but can help drive sales and propel the business towards success.

Identifying your niche

Based on a business owner’s market knowledge and experience, a niche can usually be identified. If you’re starting a new venture in a brand-new market, you may want to conduct a market survey with potential customers to help you identify that niche.

Conducting in-depth market research will also help you to understand what currently exists in the marketplace and ultimately, what areas are underserved that (this could be a target market to focus your business on).

Identifying these opportunities and niche markets will help you in the business planning process, and is essential for positioning a new business to be successful.

It can be difficult to objectively step back from your business idea and examine the market opportunities as a whole. Please share your ideas and suggestions for effectively finding a niche audience and researching market opportunities.

5 Comments

Finding your niche in the ever expanding global market is more important than ever. It is highly unlikely that any small business just starting out is going to be able to compete with ‘big box’ type retailers (online or off). You need a well defined target market and the products or services that meet the needs of those in your market. A good business plan will cause you to consider these things from the beginning and create your strategy accordingly.

The number of people that start a business without a plan is simply astounding. Our company recognized the need to create a process that would make business plan creation less intimidating and difficult. We designed the Start-Up Engine and priced it low to put it into the hands of everyone who could benefit from using it.

The Start-Up Engine really emphasizes niche marketing and highly defined target markets. Our goal was to help more people to succeed in business by giving them a really strong foundation from the start. http://www.start-upengine.com/

Finding your niche in the ever expanding global market is more important than ever. It is highly unlikely that any small business just starting out is going to be able to compete with ‘big box’ type retailers (online or off). You need a well defined target market and the products or services that meet the needs of those in your market. A good business plan will cause you to consider these things from the beginning and create your strategy accordingly.

The number of people that start a business without a plan is simply astounding. Our company recognized the need to create a process that would make business plan creation less intimidating and difficult. We designed the Start-Up Engine and priced it low to put it into the hands of everyone who could benefit from using it.

The Start-Up Engine really emphasizes niche marketing and highly defined target markets. Our goal was to help more people to succeed in business by giving them a really strong foundation from the start. http://www.start-upengine.com/

Now, there are different factors involved in this process, which determines the friendliness of a website. Before hiring an SEO agency make sure they’ll send you monthly reports of what they’ve done and the difference it’s made to your rankings for the agreed search terms. You might have tried some of these but not been able to find what you were looking or found that the returns they found were not relevant to the subject for which you were searching.